How I got started on space sims

I'm a Wing Commander nut. My parents once bought me a state of the art, $4000 (Canuckbuck) Intel 486DX33 with a whopping 8MB of RAM and a massive 120+MB hard drive, complete with DOS 6 and Windows 3.1. Man, was I the king of the geek hill. Of course, at the time, I didn't know squat about IBM PCs. I just ported over from Amiga (ah� I wish I had that still =)

But ladies and gentlemen, did that top of the line PC ever suck. Its sound was horrible (PC Speaker? You have to BUY a sound card?) The screen was tiny (15"?!), and I had no way of connecting it to the big old 31" TV, like I could my dear Amiga.

I love those spouts of flame

she's in her death throes

Within a short while, the native Windows games bored me, the stuff I got from friends sucked, and I became very disillusioned by this so-called superior computer�

And then, a miracle happened. My mother bought me a game, said that the guy at the store loved it, and I was like "oh� great." My initial instinct was to toss it aside (I mean, come on, my mother bought it!) But the cover looked interesting, despite the kind of cheesy name�

Wing Commander

What a stupid title! Who's this Chris Roberts guy anyway! Jeez, give me Sid Meier and Pirates! any day� just on my Amiga, of course.

can someone pass me a tissue

and maybe some shades

Of course, as you know after that brilliant setup, the heavens layed a mighty smackdown on my arrogant ass. First, I had to figure out how to load the game - it wasn't Windows� After weeks and weeks (no, I'm not exaggerating here) of painful smashing my head against the brick wall that was the "out of memory" error, I finally figured it out (1 incomplete hard drive format, 2 botched DOS installations, and 30 attempts at playing Wing Commander from the diskettes later�) Yes, you could play Wing Commander from the diskettes. It's just that the amount of floppy switching was insane.